Locked.

Frustrated tears work their way to the surface and I have to take a few deep breaths before I manage to stop them. This is the first time I’ve seen her leave the house since I got the pictures of Repairing the Fractured Future. I wonder briefly if I could get a screwdriver and take the whole knob off. If Sierra took the time to tell Mom she was leaving, it’s probably more than a coffee run. Surely she’ll be gone for at least an hour.

Clara or the book? I slowly withdraw my hand.

I believe in omens; it goes hand in hand with being an Oracle. Sierra being out of the house is the perfect scenario to either break into her office or change the vision. But I have to choose.

What is the universe trying to tell me? Do I need that book? If I let Clara die tonight but I get the resources I need to save the next person, is that worth it?

But what if there isn’t anything useful in the rest of the text? What if I’m wrong? Then an innocent girl is dead and I’m back at square one.

I walk back to my bedroom. Tonight I go with the sure path.

After giving the hallway a quick listen, I sprawl down on my stomach and grab the pendant from its hiding place inside the box spring of my bed. Then I sit cross-legged on the floor and brace myself with pillows. I hold the necklace in my hands and fix my eyes on it. It sparkles with glints of red, blue, and purple and, as I continue to stare, yellow and orange make appearances too.

Then I’m in the tunnel. So easily it’s almost jolting. I’m convinced that somehow, we Oracles are supposed to do this kind of thing. It’s too easy for it not to be our natural path. It’s like a part of me awakened the first time Smith showed me how to enter my visions, and now I’m ready to fulfill its potential.

But Clara first.

I walk forward and it’s like climbing uphill, but not nearly as difficult as it was before. As I approach the murder site, I begin reversing the scene in my head. The first thing I have to do is find out what the hell Clara Daniels is doing out alone, at night, the very same day a murder was discovered.

I watch as emotionlessly as I can while the brutal murder plays out in reverse. I was right about the weapon; the masked killer wields what looks like a short bat with sickening efficiency and soon we reach the point where they’re both alive.

I’m both relieved and surprised when Clara walks backward through the night by herself a few seconds later. He really did just see her and swoop in. Or he will in a few hours. But what could possibly make her walk away on her own? In the dark. With a murderer on the loose.

I trail her, growing more and more puzzled as she walks in reverse through the train station, right down the middle of the seediest neighborhood in Coldwater, and then up around some designer condo development. From there, we continue on to a nice middle-class neighborhood. I don’t know much about Clara outside of school but after the vision, I figured she lived near the train yard and maybe her parents didn’t have a car. Because then it would make sense for her to be walking there.

But as I follow she walks up the steps of a nice two-story home a good half mile from the murder site, and when I slip through the door behind her, she sheds her coat and walks backward to settle herself on a couch.

Now I’ll see something, I tell myself. A fight with her parents, a weird text or phone call.

But I see nothing.

She just reads. Panicked about time—who knows how long it’ll be before my mom calls me for dinner—I go ahead and let the scene play forward. But watching it in real time doesn’t give me any more answers than fast in reverse. If anything, it gives me more questions. She’s reading a book—a novel, not even schoolwork or anything—and then, very abruptly, she looks up, tilts her head to one side, and rises from the couch.

It’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen. She says nothing. Just slips into her coat and goes out the front door. Again, we walk side by side, as though we’re friends on a stroll, all the way back down toward the tunnel. Twice Clara stops and looks back the way we came, but each time she turns forward, and starts walking again.

We’re nearly to the train yard when I realize I’ve been watching her so carefully that I’ve almost missed my cue. I don’t know who her friends are, so as I walk alongside her I say, “Call your mom. Right now. Get your phone out and call your mom.”

Her steps slow and she looks confused, but she doesn’t reach for her phone.

“Call your dad then,” I shout. “Call someone, right now!”

She pauses this time, and I nearly die of relief when she reaches into her pocket and pulls out her phone.

And then just looks at it.

Why is this so hard? I can walk, I could probably push her over if I really tried, but she’s not following my commands. I shout step-by-step instructions at her—willing her with every fiber of my being to follow them—until finally she hits SEND and raises the phone to her ear. As soon as she does, she continues walking, as though pulled by an invisible string. She says nothing and I measure the remaining steps with my eyes hoping someone will answer before it’s too late.

Her head clicks up in an unnatural motion and she says, “Hi, Dad, I . . . I’m . . .” She pauses and her whole face crumples in confusion. “I don’t know what I—”

And then he’s there. I manage to shove Clara very slightly out of the way so the first blow that was supposed to be straight to the head wings her shoulder instead. She lets out a piercing scream of agony, and guilt shatters me from the inside out. It would have been so easy to divert her. To save her.